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Balanced Reporting. Trusted Insights.
Friday, April 11, 2025
The Environmental Quality Incentives Program will take on a broader role, with more dollars and longer contracts, as it emerges under 2018 farm bill provisions.
The new farm bill expected to head to President Donald Trump’s desk within days is making history with the breadth of support inside and outside Congress. The reason is plain to see in its 540 pages.
A compromise farm bill ready for final congressional votes melds a variety of Senate and House improvements to the major commodity programs, boosts spending on several major conservation programs while also creating a new $30 million a year program to fight animal diseases.
States need to play a larger role in protecting and recovering endangered species, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee said at a hearing Wednesday that looked at federal, state and local efforts to collaborate on wildlife conservation.
The average farmer probably won’t notice anytime soon that the 2014 farm bill has expired, but producers who try to sign up for some conservation programs could be turned away, and some commodity groups will have to go without some trade promotion funding on which they have counted.
With the new farm bill likely stalled until after the November mid-term elections, one of the biggest disputes still to be ironed out is a provision in the House farm bill that would end commodity program payments for acreage on which farmers haven’t been growing program crops.
When House and Senate negotiators sit down in coming days to start writing the final version of a new farm bill, they will find that many of their sharpest differences will be over how far they should reshape and fund conservation programs.
